An Evening With Ballindalloch

Join us for a tasting with Scotland’s first Single Estate Distillery, sitting on the historic Ballindalloch Estate in Speyside. We’re excited to have Aidan Dunn, Sales Director for Ballindalloch Distillery and 7th Generation Distiller, joining us at Subourbon for a five-dram tasting of one of the smallest distilleries in Scotland. Ballindalloch is Scotland’s first Single Estate Distillery, sitting on the historic Ballindalloch Estate in Speyside. Their barley is grown on the estate, their water comes from the estate’s own springs, and the whisky is distilled and filled, matured and bottled by hand on site. They also make very little of it, around 50,000 liters of pure alcohol per year, and they’ve deliberately kept a lot of the old-school production methods that have disappeared as Scotch distilleries have gotten bigger and more automated. Fermentations are 140 hours apart from one in five batches being 90 hours in traditional Oregon Pine washbacks. Distillation is slow, with a wash still run taking at least six hours, and the spirit is condensed through 70-meter copper worm tubs rather than modern shell-and-tube condensers. Milling, mashing, distillation, cask filling, bottling and even labelling are all handled on site by a very small team. That makes the lineup Aidan is bringing particularly interesting. We’ll have five drams, including current Ballindalloch releases alongside whisky he’s bringing specifically for us: a 10-year-old Orange Wine Cask and 2014 Single Cask Sherry samples from Ballindalloch’s inaugural year of production. It’s a rare chance to taste some of the oldest whisky Ballindalloch has made, compare it to what they’re releasing today, and spend an evening getting into how a genuinely small Speyside distillery makes whisky when efficiency isn’t the only thing driving the process.